"...we should pass over all biographies of 'the good and the great,' while we search carefully the slight records of wretches who died in prison, in Bedlam, or upon the gallows."
~Edgar Allan Poe

Friday, March 2, 2018

Weekend Link Dump


This week's Link Dump is sponsored by the International Order of Bookplate Cats!






Why the hell do witches ride brooms?

Why the hell are four-leaf clovers lucky?

How the hell was the moon formed?  Here's the latest theory.

Watch out for the monsters of Monterey Bay!

Watch out for those Victorian pleasure gardens!

Watch out for those phantom teeth!

A notorious "witchcraft murder."

A forgotten royal wedding.

Fortean party crashers.

Fortean photography.

Fortean storms.

Francis I of Austria: your go-to guy for sealing wax.

The island without wheels.

When you grow up never realizing you're on the run from the Mob.

Buying and selling wives.

A Welsh botanical excursion.

The English courtesan and the French emperor.

The Golden Age of fake backsides.

A talking Sasquatch.

The hell known as Nineteenth-Century Knitting.  (Although to be honest, I've found modern patterns on Ravelry that are written in a far more incomprehensible fashion.)

The hazards of using your own body as an experimental poison laboratory.

A medieval female sheriff.

A Regency female husband.

An elaborate 19th century "Christmas" circus.

Searching for the author of a message in a bottle.

Stalin's ill-fated meteorologist.

Oklahoma City has a bearded lady.

Egypt has a screaming mummy.

The man who transformed the health of Londoners.

In which Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein star in "The Odd Couple."

An accused witch comes to the usual bad end.

Hannah Lightfoot:  history or hoax?

So it turns out that pigeon racing is A Thing.

Harbingers of disaster.

A really, really bad employee.

Anomalous objects from ancient Egypt.

The man who claimed to be kidnapped by Bigfoot.

A chocolate-colored mermaid.

A 19th century Animal House: Opprobrious epithets and cherry rum.

This Week in Russian weird:  The strange case of the Moscow radio mistakes.

And let's also talk about UFOs and the Russian Navy.

This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, "in the soup."

Modern-day fairy sightings.

The world's worst real estate.

Africans in Tudor England.

A Degas painting has been found in a French bus.

A Polish poltergeist.

The life of a very rich--and very dreadful--socialite.

The man who lived in a tomb.

A variety of petrified corpses.

The many illnesses of Mary Tudor.

The legend of Mrs. Nightingale's ghost.

Victorian beauty tips.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a gruesome ghost story from Nigeria.  In the meantime, here's some medieval dance music!

3 comments:

  1. THe fake bums had me chuckling. Who says the notion of beauty has changed? (Or the notion of people, such as myself, who think such additions are only for asses?)

    The bookplates, though, I could go for. They can be real works of art, can't they?

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  2. Oh, and the article about Bir Tawil was fascinating. I'd seen the frontier anomaly on maps before. I noticed that on some maps, the border between Egypt and the Sudan was straight, on others it went crooked, and a few maps hedged their bets and displayed both. Now I at last know how this began - but it doesn't seem to have an ending...

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  3. The story about Stalin's meteorologist was very sad - it is great that those beautiful artworks have finally seen the light of day.

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